Father, grandfather drowned 9-year-old girl with cerebral palsy: police

A grandfather and father in East China’s Jiangsu Province were detained on Wednesday for the suspected drowning of a 9-year-old girl with cerebral palsy.

The girl’s 36-year-old father and 65-year-old grandfather, both surnamed Yang, admitted they together killed the mentally handicapped girl by drowning her in the river under a highway bridge in Jiangning district, Nanjing on the evening of June 23, police in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province said on Wednesday. Police are still investigating. In June, the dead girl was found in the river near Jiangning district wearing a backpack, in which there were reportedly two bricks weighing four kilograms in total, local newspaper Yangtse Evening Post reported on Wednesday.

Police offered a reward of 2,000 yuan ($300) for information about crime on June 26. The reward was increased to 20,000 yuan five days later as the identity of victim was not ascertained.

Police posters about the girl were put around a construction site where her father and grandfather worked, said the newspaper.

The girl’s uncle surnamed Zhang told Ziniu News on Wednesday that to cure the girl’s brain paralysis, her family had spent 100,000 yuan, but it didn’t work. Her parents got divorced because of her paralysis when the girl was 3 years old.

No one in the family wanted to raise the girl except her grandmother, who raised her for six years in Huai’an, East China’s Anhui Province. The grandmother was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and hospitalized in June, and the girl was taken to Nanjing, where her grandmother was under medical care, according to Zhang.

Construction workers who work with Yang, the girl’s grandfather, said Yang never told them he had a granddaughter.